The Harry Potter experiment
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Disclaimers: I do not own HP or anything else other than the story's concept and direction.
Summary: When all things end, they begin once again. In another universe where the curse that had just took his parents hit Harry, it opened the floodgates to a past of who he might have had always been, and shall always be.
A/N: For the sake of my story, I changed the timelines for certain events in this story and this chapter has one of them. I made Harry a few years younger when he had that incident at the zoo.
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-For The Sake of Who I Am-
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Their talk started on the broad strokes of who they were to each other and from most things that Methos thought a child could handle without getting too technical. The subjects ranged from what Methos was and what exactly was going on with Harry Potter.
To say that young man was surprised was an understatement.
"Wait." Harry interrupted Methos in his re-telling of his universe's version of Camelot. "How is it that I am able to NOT freak out from of all this?"
"It's the dream world, Harry." Methos explained as he gestured all around him, actively willing it to change scenery. "Here is where the words 'seeing, feeling, and believing' becomes rather loose and subjective. A small subconscious part of your human psyche realizes that you're still asleep in the waking world and thus can take things in stride in this one. That's how some people seem to accept that they can do the impossible here. For us, it becomes a matter of fact that we can do anything here. And that's a good thing."
"Why is that?" Harry asked.
"I have a lot to teach you and not a whole lot of time to do so in the waking world where I'm usually on guard from your relatives and their devil-spawn of a son." The man answered. "Here, time can hold no meaning should we wish it."
"What exactly will I be learning, sir? I'm only eight years old." Harry asked again, at a loss in the face of the vast ocean of knowledge that seemed to swirl around Methos.
"Well, magic will be one of them." The lost god answered. "Though I do not know exactly how your world's magic works. I have no way to read some of your world's magical texts while we're caged in this house. The raw energy of your power however, is close enough for a match for me to teach you my world's equivalent of the mystic arts as taught to me by Abrosius Embreis."
"Who is he?" Harry asked.
"He was my teacher for all intents and purposes. I was his second student after he tried to make up for his mistake when he didn't realize his first student was self-absorbed, power-mad bitch. Said student was also under the guise of his lover at the time too. Nimue was her name, taken after the real nymph Nimue whose body she controlled." Methos said as he reminisced on how they first met. "Ambrose was not the same kind of immortal my children were, the powers he learned to wield made him just as long lived as one in the long run. He changed his name several times over the centuries, frequently too, while he actively pursued a dream of a nation filled with equals. Old coot went to ground after one of his more ambitious attempts blew up in his face and started to work behind the scenes instead of the forefront."
"Wow!" Harry said in awe.
"Yeah." Methos thought aloud as shook his head when he remembered that the idiot-savant wizard shaved off his beard and dyed his hair after the debacle. Frustrated with the whole mess, he locked himself in a cave for a few hundred years until anyone who knew him had long since passed. "I even helped him for a bit on that one until Arthur got so bloody wasted that he accidentally slept with his half-sister and got her knocked up with a bastard son. The bitch had named their illegitimate son, Mordred. I dunno what kind of drink he got served with that night, but just about everything went downhill after that."
Harry gawked. The legends of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table were one of the few books he read when he had discovered that hiding in a library kept him marginally safe from Dudley and his gang. It gave him hope that the "normal" stuff his relatives did to him was not the norm.
"Arthur? King Arthur? He was real in your world? And your teacher was actually Merlin?" Harry asked with barely repressed glee.
"Yep, it seemed the legend played itself out here too, albeit differently. Since we're both one being, what you read, I read too." Methos confirmed to himself. "Merlin was the name Ambrose went by that time, but after the fall of Camelot, he went so far as to dissociate himself from his own name when his former apprentice, Arthur's step-sister, used their bastard son in her bid to wrest Camelot's throne. It was a right sorry mess, I tell you, it was hard on all of us to see a dream so shattered."
"Who were you that time?" Harry had to ask, amused and enthralled at the picture the "old man" painted.
"I went as the one person most people least expected me to go as. I went as someone I would rather not be caught dead as if I could help it." Methos roared in laughter as he struck a pose. "I became the best of the best, a flower of chivalry. A man so noble, that people would not even think twice to associate him as me in a sentence. I swear if I had been fully mortal, I would have given myself diabetes ten thousand times over from the sugary drivel I spouted out loud back then. I out-boy scouted the boy scout Highlander in so many ways it had have made him think twice to lecture me on morals. Hell, some of the lines he spouted off on some of his morality tirades were mine and had been passed down from generation to generation!"
"You were Lancelot?!" Harry yelped in shock as he guessed, correctly, by the smirk on the lost deity's face. "Bloody hell."
"Watch your language kid." Methos admonished the child with a chuckle while Harry retorted with a stuck out tongue, and said something about pots and kettles. "In any case, I left that life behind me after seeing Guinevere off at the nunnery one last time. Oh, I know that look on your face, we only had ONE affair and everyone thinks we stabbed Art in the back. One, she wasn't married yet when we first met, and two, Art's marriage to Gwen was more about politics at first. I didn't even think she WAS that same Guinevere until I came to Camelot and Ambrose roped me into joining the Knights there while I trained under him in secret.
"It was a bit of a shock when I first saw her again." Methos continued. "I tried to stay away, but when have I ever listened to common sense? Gwen's feelings for me never changed, but I saw that she was also falling for Arthur as time passed. Who wouldn't love the man? Arthur's ideals at the time were radical, and if anyone had the balls to try to do it, it would have to be him. Were he Immortal, I would have gladly exposed myself just to train him. It was a bit of a letdown for all of us when things fell apart."
"When all was said and done...." Methos continued. "Gwen bade me to deliver her to a nunnery so she could spend the rest of her days in prayer and silent contemplation. She never recovered from losing Arthur and died less than ten years later. Poor Ambrose was the most affected, old coot went ballistic and rampaged after the ones responsible. It was a two-front showdown and the idiot dragged me along with him. He tried to kill Morgana on the first strike, but she pulled a fast one and actually morphed into Nimue. You could immagine our shock at that one."
"I think." Methos said. "That was the final straw on the proverbial camel's back for Ambrose. Not only did the damned witch ensnare Arthur... but he was the one she got to first to start it all. You see, he actually fell in love with her as Nimue and was heartbroken that she had used him. I helped land the killing blow by way of controlled quickening. The lightning bolt that hit her wasn't completely mystical in origin at all, so she never expected that kind of attack. She hadn't even known I was immortal, now one did. During that time I had already mastered my own quickening enough to make it appear as if I had none."
"Wow." Harry said again. "What happened to Nimue once Morgana Le Fey died."
"She was too far gone." Methos answered. "Once Le Fey was out of her system, the magic that the dark witch had used to snare the nymph started to eat her from inside out, they essentially were one and the same now as Le Fey usurped her body for her own. There was nothing Merlin or I could have done. Before she breathed her last, she told Merlin not to despair, for while Le Fey may have been in control of her that time, the nymph was somewhat aware of the time they had spent together - ensnared or not - the real Nimue saw the good Merlin did and where she free, she would have returned the love he truly deserved. When she was gone, we wrapped up Morgana's shell and burned it alongside her dead son."
"Afterward, the old coot handed me Caliburn when Princess Viviane - Fey of the Lake - got word to him and asked him to pass it on to me. Both said the damned thing was actually mine now that no one else was acceptable enough for the sword's standards to wield it. Funny thing about the damned sword, it changed shaped the moment it was in my hand and was barely recognizable as Arthur's blade." Methos said. "I drank myself into a stupor after that, then stripped one of my armors bare of any markings and painted the damned thing black. In it, I let my frustrations out on the remaining morons who brought about Camelot's downfall. I got myself a nasty rep against those types too afterwards. I kept the sword, placed a few charms over it and asked it to take the shape of an Ivanhoe so no one would recognize it. It stayed with me wherever I go, able to appear at my beck and call."
Harry stopped Methos for a moment and thought out loud. "What about Galahad? Since you were immortal that time, how come they said he was your son?"
"Oh." Methos sobered a bit in his mirth. "He was a foundling and a student of mine – died young too and got stuck as a perennial 17 year old teenager until his true death and was re-absorbed. He WAS one of my sons for real, now that I think about it, thanks to re-merging with the Source. You have to know though, as time passed, the Source began to develop an active will all on its own and kept splitting itself because it was the last act I ever did before I lost contact with it and became a semi-normal immortal like my children."
Suddenly, Methos changed topics. "Enough about me, even though time is relative in this place, the outside world still moves on its predetermined pace. I brought you here to train, and I'll do just that. The first thing you need above all else, is focus. With focus, you can control your magic to a point that will be as instinctive as breathing. The side effect of being able to do so would secure your thoughts and prevent intrusion. I don't know about you, but once humanity had ventured out of their galaxy, they encountered a few telepathic races that enter your thoughts automatically. Some of them are pure telepaths and don't even speak verbally at all but through mindspeak alone."
With that in mind, the lost god started teaching Harry the basics of centering oneself. From that moment forward, any nightmare the child experienced were simply collected as data to be studied, analyzed, and discussed between the two of them. With Methos as the proverbial "guard" until he can marshal his own mental defense, the child would no longer be afraid of dreams that had kept him awake and a screaming wreck since he could remember. The tutelage also developed a habit within him to look at any problem or situation from any angle possible, of course he wasn't as good as Methos yet, he didn't have close to an eon of life experiences to become a master at it for the foreseeable future. It was enough in the interim until they merged and became one being.
Little by little, the boy that was Harry Potter was growing up to be the man his parents meant him to be. And during that time, Methos planned for the Dursley's come-uppance for their treatment of the boy.
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A/N: Again, a short chapter for another story of mine -- but such is what I am capable of right now due to time constraints.... also, I intentionally changed the Arthurian legend into something of my own design..... is an AU of an Arthurian AU..... More will come as I find more free time to write. I just wanted to introduce something in the story that will have an impact later on....